As It Should Be
by Ymaconis
Summary: AU. Rose fell in the Void at the end of Doomsday, and 11 has just flown the Pandorica into the heart of the exploding TARDIS. 11/Rose, Amy/Rory, Donna/James 10.2 and possible River/Jack. Jenny may show up... Read and Review, please!
1. Prologue

**You can thank the epic-ness that is Chameleon Circuit for this; I was listening to 'Big Bang Two', and remembered the whole Void thing, and then… PING! This popped into my head.**

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Doctor Who. Wishing isn't working this time.**

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_FOUR YEARS AGO_

"NO!" the Doctor shouted, but it was too late. The Void had closed… With Rose trapped within it. "No…" He collapsed against the wall, feeling tears slip down his cheeks. "Rose… Oh, Rassilon, what am I going to tell Jackie?"

_TWO YEARS AGO_

When Mickey and Jackie show up to help get rid of the Daleks, the Doctor couldn't be more amazed. Sure, Jackie slapped him after he aborted his would-have-been regeneration, but if he was being honest, he would have thought that she would hate him for losing Rose.

About an hour and half later, he had returned Jackie to her life with Pete, and a son named Tony. Jackie proved him wrong about not being able to be more amazed; he wouldn't have thought that she would be telling her son about the man that had lost her daughter forever. "Take care of yourself," had been the last thing she had said before sending him back to the TARDIS where Donna and the Meta-crisis waited.

He had let them off back in Chiswick, since the Meta-crisis, who had named himself James, saying that "you never know when you're going to need to call yourself 'John Smith' again." The Doctor knew that when next he saw them, they would probably be married or something of that nature; after all, Donna would burn without James to keep her Time Lord mind under wraps with his presence.

_ONE YEAR AGO_

He hadn't meant to go there. He had never meant to land the TARDIS on New Year's 2005, and he had meant even less to land just by the Powell Estate. Still, the TARDIS didn't seem to agree, and he ended up seeing Rose one last time before he regenerated.

_SIX MONTHS AGO_

Watching Rory die and then be erased struck the Doctor harder than he could admit, especially since he had to stop Amy from forgetting.

But when he failed even Rory's memory coupled with the fact that the piece of rubble he had got from the crack was a piece of his TARDIS, it became too much. In a haze he had piloted the TARDIS back in the Vortex, and he was infinitely grateful when Amy retreated to her room.

He had barely managed to get to his own room before the sorrow took him under. "Why do I continue to let them come on board? I just keep killing them all... Rory was right. I am a danger to everyone around me."

_PRESENT_

Knowing that he was going to be trapped in the Void didn't bother him as much as he knew it should. Amy and Rory would get their wedding, and River would... Well, the Doctor just hoped that River wasn't wiped from existence. If he hadn't known that she was on a one-way trip to her death, he would have introduced River to Jack. Rassilon knew the immortal needed someone to keep him in check, and River seemed like the perfect person for the job.

Still, even though flying the Pandorica into the heart of his burning TARDIS meant that when the cracks closed, he would be on the wrong side, in the Void, he found that he just wasn't able to be as bothered about it as he should be.

Because he knew that in the Void, they're was the faintest chance to see Rose again. And he would give anything to see Rose.

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**Well, that concludes the prologue... Chapter 1 will (hopefully) be up shortly. Review please!**


	2. Chapter 1

**As I've had some Writer's Block as of late I had gotten used to seeing my inbox being empty of reports on ... So one can imagine my surprise when I open up my email, thinking I'll only have maybe five things tops, and then there's... Twenty new reports from here, all of them for this story... Five reviews when it's only been up for less than a day? And I thought I was bad about these kinds of things...**

**As you can probably tell, that made it so I wrote this up. Thanks for the support, guys! *gives out cyber cookies to everyone* I, the authoress, am in your debt for all this feedback.**

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Over the years, at least she thinks it has been years, if not decades, she had started to lose track of time. The Void was just a swirling mess of debris from all over the place, and as far as she knew, there was no one else here. And that was something she would know, having spent the first few months (her sense of time fading the longer she was in here, but early on it had still been fairly strong, or at least, she thought so) making sure that all the Cybermen and Daleks were destroyed. The last thing she wants was to have one of them sneak up on her and either exterminate or delete her, depending on which finds her first.

Luckily, all she had found was piles and piles of parts. When she required something for her piecemeal 'home', she would often salvage Dalek bits, but she knows better than to even go near the Cybermen scraps.

Still, her existence is tolerable, at times even fascinating when a 'window', as she has taken to calling them, seeing as the just showed her the view of the rest of the universes, would appear, and then she would be able to see what was happening outside the Void.

She had noted that most of the windows opened to her home universe, and that as of late, the windows seemed to occur more and more frequently. She had seen the Doctor through it, and although she did have to wonder what possessed him to wear the bowtie, she kind of liked the newest Doctor. He was handsome, and something about him was just pathetically endearing.

Yet, even with the windows and the fact that she seems to be the only living being in the Void, she had moved on with her life. She has built her home, which could barely pass for a house and more a carefully structured parts mess, figured out how to get to the landmasses that grew food (plants seemed to grow just fine here, even if she had yet to see anything else living here) even if she didn't seem to really need it here, and even nurtures a garden on the landmass that made up her 'property'.

Yes, there were times that she felt a single blow would shatter her, and that had been what had lead to her figuring out how to move around her. Initially, she had stayed to the single chunk of some poor planet or asteroid that had fallen into the Void, but after she had cried herself dry, a fidgety energy had replaced the tears, and she had jumped, thinking she would fall. Rather, she had leapt up and out, landing at the nearest landmass.

Lately, though, she's been more careful as she travels, because sometimes she could swear that if she took one wrong step, she would fall and just keep falling. There's little doubt in her mind, the Void is in danger, and if the Void collapsed...

"End of the universe," she said, having gotten in a habit of talking to herself (although she pretended the Void was listening) as there was no one else to talk to. "No, end of the multiverse. The Void is the space in between all the universes. If it goes, they'll just be gone. Everything would just...end."

During her time here in the Void, windows had occasionally opened to show her both the being and end of an entire universe. Once, a window had opened long enough for her to see one universe end and another begin in its place. Another time, incredibly bored, she had counted all the different universes she had seen, and at the moment, the count was... "One billion, eight hundred ninety-four million, seven hundred thirty-five thousand, and three."

She had once wondered why nothing she forgot nothing she learned in the Void, and had just accepted it as a gift, one that couldn't alleviate this curse, but just something to help make it tolerable. "If I ever do figure out how to get back home, I wouldn't be surprised to find that I would be the smartest human there." She knew that in another universe, she would only be average, as all people there got the sum knowledge of their entire race. From her window-watching, she knew that, in a way, that's how it had once been for the Doctor.

Packing the rest of the berries (she doesn't know what species they are, but she checked them with a toxicity-thing she found, and they're edible for humans) into the bag she made from a torn something-or-other (so much of the Void is filled with broken objects that she can't help but wonder if it's an inter-dimensional refuse station in reality, and that means about her if it is) and carefully leaps back to her home.

But as she does so, her mind wanders, noting some of these jumps seem to last hours. Or maybe being here in the Void has increased her mental speed, so that she can go over days of memories in seconds. She knows that being here has destroyed her ability to concentrate, or maybe it was her Doctor, the one in the pinstripe suit with the fantastic hair. "Might 'ave even been Big Ears, 'e was plenty energetic in 'is own way."

That's one thing the Void hasn't fully taken away from her. At times, her accent still comes through; although she has to admit that if she went into a Doctor-type rant (she can do that now, having learned all about technology, quantum mechanics and time-space relativity among other things) with her accent cropping up, it would be...humorous, at the very least.

"But who am I supposed to rant to?" she asks of the Void, spinning as she floats (there really is no other word for it) towards the place she calls home but would give up at a moment's notice. Her hair fans out around her, and for a moment she wonders why her hair continues when her nails and she in general have stayed seemingly frozen in time.

Not that she's overly upset over her hair; rather, it's one of the few things she's still proud of. As it grew, it also became lighter in colour, now a mix of gold and soft brown compared to her once bleached blonde. Normally she takes the time to braid it, seeing as when it's done it swishes nearly to her knees, but today she had left it loose, and now it's acting like a cape or cloak, hiding her from anything that may be here.

She spins again as she fells the soft tug of the gravity of her landmass pulling her down, and for the first time that day she notices that none of the slightly 'off' feelings of recently are still present. Instead, there is a strange sense, almost as if something had fallen into the Void that shouldn't have. Still, if anyone asked her, she would say that the Void was no longer in any danger.

Knowing that she could probably leave her house and come back a hundred years later, she sets the bag of fruit down inside the door, one of the few things she found that she had actually used like it was intended, she leapt away again, trusting her instincts to tell her when she found what she was looking for, which was whatever had fallen into the Void this time.

"Hello there, and welcome to the Void," she said to herself, suddenly finding the prospect of actually meeting someone, anyone, absurdly funny. "Here, you can expect no weather, no noticeable passage time except for in the plants', and possibly in your hair's, growth, although do prepare to becoming used to stuff just showing up as it falls into the Void. The best mode of transportation? Just jump in the direction that you wish to go, and you'll find yourself landing at the nearest landmass to your destination. If you should need anything, it won't be hard to find me. I'm your only neighbour for infinity."

Her short and rather unstable burst of humour quickly fades with her first discovery; a destroyed Dalek that seemed to have been left to fossilize for a few millenniums. She hesitates, suddenly nervous about what else she might find.

"Well, that was anticlimactic," she said, picking up the mop and twirling it in her hands. Still, just by holding it she could tell that it was from around her time period, and because of the Dalek, she had to assume from her universe. "Still... A mop? What possible significance could a mop have?"

Holding it as one would a bindle stick (and finding the thought of one of the past Doctors she had seen through a window, the one with the ridiculously long scarf, posing as a hobo rather...humorous, if somewhat bittersweet), she continues forth, slightly more confidant now that she had a weapon should she run into any more Daleks. "After all, if Ace was able to beat one up with a baseball bat, I should be able to do the same with a mop. In theory, anyway..."

She isn't quite sure what to make of the next thing she finds. A rather large cube of some time, it was open to reveal a chair that could either be to secure someone for flight or to restrain them and trap them in the box. "What are you?" Knowing that she wouldn't get an answer (unless it was sentient, and knowing how big the universe really was, she wouldn't think it impossible), she turns to see if anything else had fallen through.

The results caused her to freeze where she stood, the thought that she had finally gone insane coming to mind, because this... This was impossible. It had to be.

But obviously not, because maybe a dozen meters from the mysterious box is another box, one she's both fantastically familiar with and horribly foreign to.

"The TARDIS," she whispers, walking forward to see if her key will still fit the lock, as the TARDIS regenerated, too. It still does, and for one second or one eternity, she isn't sure which, she just stands there before she can sum up the courage to turn her key. Her key that, she only now realizes, is warm after being cold so very long.

"What?" It's the latest Doctor (eleven, she knows, having managed to get them all ordered through her window-watching), but still she doesn't let him ask more than that before she's crossed the room and thrown her arms around him, needing to know that this isn't a dream and wishing that it was, because it means he's trapped here, too. "It really is you," she whispers, tears falling for what seems like the millionth time since she last saw him, and yet this time she doesn't weep, she's happy. Even though he's trapped here, and she knows that that's a very bad thing, she can't help but feel happy. Free.

"What?" the Doctor repeats, pulling away and holding her at an arm's length, unable to believe this, even though it's part of the reason he's here now (after all, she healed him after the Time War, and she looked into the heart of the TARDIS), because from the length of her hair compared to the length it was when he last saw her, she should be...well, more than four years older than when she was when they last were together.

Yet, except for her hair, she looks the same, which made recognizing her that much easier. Still, somehow, he doesn't know what to say to her.

Luckily, she picks up the slack. "Doctor."

Hearing his name from her, he finds the words. "Rose Tyler."

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**That was actually really fun to write, because I got to make it progressive rather than past tense, seeing as one would assume time would flow differently in the Void. And my idea for the Void comes from both what my friends think it would be like in there and my own mental imagery. Hope you all like this chapter as much as I do. And leaving Rose unnamed until the end seemed like a good idea.**

**And yes, the mop Rose picked up is the one the Doctor was holding when he first teleported back to Rory in 'The Big Bang'. I liked the mop; I thought it should have the honour of being the anticlimactic thing that Rose found. And I tossed in a Dalek! Sorry, I'm just giddy over the fact that in less than 24-hours, this story had 190 views, 5 reviews, 3 faves and 14 alerts. All for a prologue... You lot spoil me, you do. But please review anyway?**


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